Very interesting post, dr_bernie.

 

I didn't know much about Shade other than the name, but for some reason I thought it was solely for modeling.  I hadn't realized it had become an all-in-one app.  Price range seems to put it between Modo on the higher end and Carrara on the lower.  I also didn't know that it could use Poser characters natively, though you mention it needs a plugin to do this?  Is it a bit like Vue, where both Vue and Poser need to be installed and running, before you can repose the Poser characters inside the Vue scene?

 

As Shade does seem to be an all-in-one type app, I'm wondering if efrontier would view Carrara as a competitor app instead a of a complementary one, and if they bought it seems they might just want to take it off the market.  So that's a possible downside to consider.  Also their pricetag on Shade is a lot more than Carrara, so if they acquired Carrara and started developing new releases, I can't help but wonder if the upgrade prices might knock me out of the customer base (I'm a hobbyist).

 

It's weird that you're experiencing slower render times with 8.5, since I'm getting slightly faster renders, but then again I can only dream of rendering with a system like what you've got (I'm using a I5 laptop only 4 threads rendering at a time).

 

Stan, that's a really interesting theory about why DAZ bought Carrara to begin with, I had never thought of that before but I think you're on to something and that might explain why DAZ seems to have no real coherent strategy for how to develop Carrara.  If so I'm more worried about the supposedly right-around-the-corner release of Carrara 9. 

 

I bought 8.5, mostly because I had the extra money to do so and wanted to play with Genesis (when DAZ restructured the forums and store on their site it locked me out, so I never got to try out any of the betas except for the very early one that deleted your runtimes and in which Genesis didn't work at all).  I had the extra scratch to buy it and I got to play with Genesis for the first time, fine, but $85.50 is much more than just a nominal fee and for what was part of 8.5 (Genesis, some bug fixes, a tiny bit faster rendering and assembly room, a few new animation controls), I think it was very steeply priced. 

 

I'm finding Genesis is intriguing but even the full 8.5 release still has some hit or miss things with Genesis, like Genesis 2 doesn't appear to autofit at all, there are some kinks with Genesis autofit, and as another poster in the DAZ forums mentioned, the geo-grafted genitals don't work right at all, just seems like even though there were bug fixes for 8, they've added some all new bugs to 8.5, and for the price of the upgrade that's not cool.

 

I don't think DAZ will sell Carrara, but the fact they are still charging (heftily in the case of the 8.5) would seem to indicate they have some plan to develop it further, especially as they've announced that Carrara 9 will be sometime 1st quarter of 2014, but it's anybody's guess what exactly that plan entails.

 

Of the choices you've speculated about (jumping back to dr bernie's original post), I would think considering the prices many of those company's charge for there existing software we as users would be looking at a much more expensive Carrara (possibly worth it if the development increase is substantial, but since Carrara is priced for hobbyists now I wonder if much of the current user base would be priced out of the market).  From the perspective of those companies though I think it would be a worthwhile investment, if they can get DAZ to sell.